ArtFacts.Net

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ArtFacts.Net is the world's largest art database on the Internet , which was founded in 2001 by Stine Albertsen and Marek Claaßen. The company is registered as a Limited Company (Ltd.) in Great Britain. ArtFacts has been collecting, archiving, publishing and analyzing data on the art market worldwide, for example in the so-called artist ranking .

history

Marek Claaßen developed in cooperation with the Federal Association of German Galleries and Art Dealers e. V. and Messe Art Cologne database-based websites and systems for the quick creation of exhibition catalogs, later with GISI, (gallery information system on the Internet) a virtual exhibition and archive system for galleries in Berlin, the forerunner of today's art platform Artfacts. Stine Albertsen (* 1978 in Copenhagen ) worked for the Danish embassy in Berlin before she co-founded Artfacts in 2001.

When ArtFacts was founded in 2001, the company began to systematically collect data on the (primary) art market . The focus is on the exhibition activities of artists: Institutions (art associations, museums or art halls, etc.) and galleries report to ArtFacts their solo and group exhibitions and ArtFacts aggregates them for the respective artists and exhibition institutions into an exhibition history. In 2004 the so-called ArtFacts Ranking was introduced, which measures the exhibition activity of the artists and illustrates it with graphs. The years before the global financial crisis caused the art market and the number of galleries to grow rapidly. In this context, ArtFacts developed into an international art market platform with 900,000 unique visitors per month.

With the financial market crisis, the art market also got into trouble, as a result, many galleries closed or cut their costs. Galleries as previous main customers of ArtFacts declined and endangered the company not only financially, but also when collecting the exhibition data. With the introduction of new memberships, for example for artists, curators or collectors, this could be absorbed and the reach in the art world even increased. With the expansion of an international team of editors, the company was able to check the information received.

The technological change in the internet and in end devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) led to an adaptation of artifacts to today's standards.

"Artist Ranking"

Example artist ranking - how does the assignment of exhibition to graphic representation work

ArtFacts relates artists to one another based on a complex algorithm that assumes that each exhibition has a different weight in the art world. So z. For example, an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York is valued higher than one in a rural art association with few visitors. In addition to the exhibition activity, the algorithm also evaluates the range and quality of the institutions or collections and awards them with points. The accumulated points are displayed graphically so that the user can follow and compare the development of artists.

The theoretical background of this approach is, for example, the cultural sociological studies of Pierre Bourdieu or Georg Franck's book Ökonomie der Achtung ( Economics of Attention) from 1998. The ranking is controversial in the art world: for example, the business magazine Capital publishes the top 100 artists once a year , based on data from Artfacts . It is viewed critically that the depiction mostly gives higher weight to contemporaries and younger artists than classics such as Renoir or Rembrandt. But artists, too, repeatedly encounter each other when reducing their activity to a mathematical representation.

"Editorial Team"

While many databases on the Internet are built up by so-called web crawlers ( scraping ), the ArtFacts database includes information on the art market that has been entered and checked by people. A team of international editors has checked all reports since the company was founded. Negative effects on the Artist ranking or rating of galleries, for example by social bots , are reduced as a result. In 2017, the database includes almost 800,000 exhibitions, over 20,000 galleries, and more than 560,000 artists from a total of 192 countries.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tamar Yogev, Thomas Grund: Network Dynamics and Market Structure: The Case of Art Fairs . In: Sociological Focus . tape 45 , no. 1 , January 11, 2012, ISSN  0038-0237 , p. 30 , doi : 10.1080 / 00380237.2012.630846 .
  2. ↑ Postpopart . Zitty, Berlin 1996.
  3. ↑ Explanation of the artist ranking. Retrieved March 14, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Jens Beckert, Jörg Rössel: Art and prices. KZfSS Cologne Journal for Sociology and Social Psychology, March 1, 2004, accessed on March 15, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Ranking explanation. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 1, 2016 ; accessed on March 15, 2017 .
  6. ^ Pierre Bourdieu: Art and Culture. Art and artistic field . In: Writings on cultural sociology 4 . Fonts - volume 12 .2. Suhrkamp, ​​2015, ISBN 978-3-518-29726-1 , pp. 546 .
  7. ^ Georg Franck: The Economy of Attention. December 7, 1999, accessed March 21, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Young German artists before international breakthrough. Retrieved March 15, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Veronika Csizi: Art not only for the gallery. (No longer available online.) Tagesspiegel , November 22, 2010, archived from the original on March 16, 2017 ; accessed on March 15, 2017 .
  10. ↑ Interview by Karin Schulze: Art show “The Perfect Exhibition”. Der Spiegel , May 28, 2010, accessed March 15, 2017 .
  11. ^ Teresa Sickert: Unmasking Social Bots. Spiegel Online , January 19, 2017, accessed March 18, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Artfacts beta home page. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on October 28, 2017 ; accessed on March 18, 2017 .